Continuing from * More Rational Than II,
C. S. Lewis describes this same problem Tolstoy had with the added color of modern belief in evolutionary biology. He writes: You might decide to simply have as good a time as possible.
The universe is a narrative of nonsense, but since you are here, grab what you can. Unfortunately . . . you can’t, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by a collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behavior of your genes. You can’t go on getting very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is a pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it. You may still be, in the lowest sense, having a “good time”; but just so far as it becomes very good, just so far as it ever threatens to push you on from cold sensuality into real warmth and enthusiasm and joy, so far you will be forced to feel the hopeless disharmony between your own emotions and the universe in which you [think you] really live.
By contrast, life meaning and purpose play out for a Christian believer in the very opposite direction. Christians do not say to themselves: “Stop thinking out the implications of what you believe about the universe. Just try to enjoy the day.” No, if a Christian is feeling downcast and meaningless, it is because, in a sense, she is not being rational enough. She is not thinking enough about the implications of what she believes about the universe.
Christians believe that there is a God who made us in love to know him, but that as a human race we turned away and were lost to him. However, he has promised to bring us back to himself. God sent his Son into the world to break the power of sin and death at infinite cost to himself, by going to the cross. Christian teaching is that Jesus rose from the dead and passed through the heavens and now is ruling history and preparing a future new heaven and a new earth, without death and suffering, in which we will live with him forever. And then all the deepest longings of our hearts will find fulfillment.
It is fair to say that if you are a Christian with those beliefs—about who you are to God and what is in store for you—but you are not experiencing peace and meaning, then it is because you are not thinking enough. There is a kind of shallow, temporary peace that modern people can get from not thinking too much about their situation, but Christianity can give a deep peace and meaning that come from making yourself as aware and as mindful of your beliefs as possible.
If you believe there is no discovered meaning in life, only created meaning, then if you really start to think globally—about the fact that nothing you do is going to make any difference in the end—you are going to begin to experience the dread and nausea of the modernists. And, of course, you don’t have to think like this—you can put it out of your mind—that is certainly how most people in the secular culture live today. But that is my first point. This is not a very rational way to have meaning in life. Created meaning is a less rational way to live life than doing so with discovered meaning. ~Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God (Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, 2016) p.68-69
